At home, Jon Stewart was poking fun at the grandiosity of the “Obama Quest” and “the Obamanauts.” He showed film clips of “our hero” in chain mail fighting off dragons and a Cyclops in his crusade to come home and rule over Dreamerica.

By happenstance, on O-Force One I raised the matter of quests and Cyclops with the candidate. Having read that he had left the trail in early June to go back to Chicago and see his daughter Malia perform in “The Odyssey” for theater class, I wondered if that rang any bells on this trip? The hero on a foreign journey, battling through obstacles to get back home, where more trouble would wait?

Unlike an idol, Bobby Kennedy, Obama does not see himself in terms of Greek myth, although he did tell The Times’s Jeff Zeleny on the trip that he knew the risks of “flying too close to the sun.”

The Obamanauts were so pleased with navigating their complex thicket of global photo-ops — without even one embarrassing picture of Obama hugging an Arab — that they weren’t as wary with the press.

The senator left his briefing books behind for a rare instance of mingling with his journalism posse at a Berlin restaurant as he sipped a rare “very dry” martini with olives. (This was either because he wanted to charm the press, which, contrary to popular imagination, is not universally enchanted with him, or because he could not get ESPN in his hotel room.)

The Obamanauts were so elated that they didn’t even seem to mind the caricature of Obama, ears sticking out, that had been drawn on the round We-Are-The-World Obama logo in the press section. The cartoon candidate demanded: “Worship me.”

Photo

Credit
Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

After he got out of the Middle East unscathed and filled up the park in Berlin, Obama seemed to relax.

I asked him what presents he takes home to his daughters. “Anytime I make a stop, Sasha gets snow globes and Malia gets key chains,” he said. “Somebody is assigned to that.”

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“I was not well organized enough to personally think of what presents to give these guys,” Obama said. “Hopefully, should I end up being president, I can put my touch on the present thing. But I didn’t even know it was a custom to give presents other than state visits.”

I said he could be forgiven for not knowing the customs of a trip that had never taken place before — a mere presumptive nominee of one party being feted like a president. Or, given W.’s repellant effect on Old Europe and Obama’s pheromone effect, better than a president.

The British opposition leader David Cameron gave Obama a copy of Winston Churchill’s “A History of the English-Speaking Peoples” and a box of CDs by British bands, including the Smiths, Radiohead and the Gorillaz.

Obama told Cameron that he had been told by “somebody who had worked in the White House” that “should we be successful, that actually the most important thing you need to do is have big chunks of time during the day when all you’re doing is thinking.”

Sure enough, “our hero” came home to a passel of economic troubles in Dreamerica, rushing to talk to Bernanke & Paulson. Some news analyses of his trip wondered “Where’s the Bounce?” The old Hillary refrain — why can’t he close the deal against a supposedly flawed opponent — echoes.

A USA Today/Gallup poll found that his trip “has not broadened confidence in his ability to be commander of the U.S. military,” according to the paper, and “suggested Obama’s trip may have helped energize voters who favor McCain.”

Obama met with House Democrats on Tuesday evening. Some said his reception was not as enthusiastic as the one Hillary got when she returned from her odyssey. The room warmed to him, mainly because he told the lawmakers how much he’d need them to get policies passed if he gets elected.

Odysseus’s heroic trait is his cunning intelligence. Given his inability to get lift off, even flying close to the sun, Obama will need all he can muster.

A version of this op-ed appears in print on , on Page A17 of the New York edition with the headline: Cyclops And Cunning. Today's Paper|Subscribe